VORP is one of the new stats that I really like and would love to really begin using more heavily for fantasy baseball.

Few Questions though:

-Is there any big flaw with it?
-Any factors that can majorly effect it?

Most importantly....

-Where is a good place to find this statistic for FREE on the Web thats easy to use?

Is pushing for President Obama to pass a law requiring all citizens to be Chicago White Sox fans and make October 1st "White Sox Day" where we all dress as our favorite player. It maybe socialist, but I don't care.

While VORP is a great stat for summarizing player contributions, I'd caution against using it for fantasy unless your league uses it as a stat category. VORP values player contributions based on their historical relationship to team run production. It also bases that assessment on the contribution of a hypothetical replacement player.

While in some ways this mirrors what you want to do in rankings, like most ranking systems, VORP uses its own ways to value performance and they relate to the importance of player activities in real baseball. For example, VORP does not value SBs very highly and counts CS against player performance. Most fantasy leagues, however, value SBs very highly, and don't count CS at all.

So, if you use VORP to rank players, you will underrate the fantasy performance of guys with high SB totals.

VORP is a flawed concept for fantasy baseball. Think of it this way, if you are in a 12 team league and there are 11 really good 3B and a huge drop off, are those 11 good 3B really worth a ton more just because the 12th-14th 3B are so bad?

What you want to look at is the standard deviation of the 3B who will be drafted, that should define how much extra you bid for a player based on position, not comparing them to hard to predict players who wont' even make teams.

Also as I already pointed out in that linked thread using positional scarcity by individual stat is just terrible. A SB by a C isn't somehow magically more valuable than a SB by a SS... it simply is not. What you want to do is come up with a point valuation system and use the overall point totals to come up with your positional scarcity offset, not an individual stat.

Last edited by Ender on Tue Feb 13, 2007 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

It's not that VORP is flawed. It's simply that in playing fantasy YOU have to define what replacement means for your league and YOU have to define what value is for your league. The method used to create VORP is basically identical to what you would want to use to rank fantasy players. But, the actual VORP numbers from a regular baseball site like BP are based on "real baseball" value and "real baseball" replacement levels.

I disagree, VORP is flawed to begin with from a fantasy perspective. You simply are not concerned with how valuable your players are compared to a FA, you are concerned with how valuable your players are compared to the other teams players.

I play in a 14 team league with 24 roster spots and 3 bench spots per team. That means 378 players are drafted. Here is what a VORP system does with that, it ignores the 336 best players and assigns player values based on the 337-378th best players in the league. How exactly is that a better system than one that assigns player value based on the 336 best players. It just baffles me that people still believe that a VORP based system is a good one.

The most classic example of this is with SS's and 2B. There are 7-8 really good SS's and a bunch of mediocre ones. There is 1 really good 2B, 2-3 decent ones and a bunch of mediocre ones. The VORP level SS and the VORP level 2B are more or less the same. VORP treats these 2 positions exactly the same... why would you want that? They aren't anything alike. Using a STD deviation system will pump up the value of those 7-8 really good SS's without pumping up the value of the mediocre ones nearly as much as the mediocre 2B.

the vorp system can be adapted to your league and settings and is used not explicity for dollar values but for helping ranking players. i really only use it to rank WITHIN a position and then use common sense and other things to integrate the positions. on a position by position basis it is very useful to help weigh how much 2 sbs compares to 10 rbi, by giving it a quantifyable value, instead of sitting there saying....hmmm...i wonder which is better? it is also not designed to be followed verbatim, just as a useful guide to rank players. if you think it devalues steals, bump up the steal coefficient, if you think wins are worth too much, drop it for wins. it is nice because you have all the flexibility when you set up your own system.

Its not even good for that. 2 SB from a SS is not worth less than 2 SB by a C. That makes absolutely no sense. You are just hurting yourself by setting up your rankings that way. If there was some C that hit .200 with 1 HR, 40 R, 30 RBi but managed 40 SB by a VORP system he'd be the most valuable C in fantasy baseball because of the tight STD Dev of SB for C's. There is no way that C is worth more than Mauer or McCann. Positional stats are meaningless, if you are going to run a STD DEV or VORP style system you need to base it on total points earned, not individual positional stats.

I just don't get how people justify this system, especially the one that rates positional players by individual statistics. How on earth do you play fantasy baseball and come up with the opinion that a 10 SB C is somehow better than 10 SB from a SS. A system that rates like that is a losing system because if we have exactly the same players but 10 of your SB come from C and 10 of mine come from SS I still have a small amount of extra points for other stats on my SS and I'll edge you out in overall value.

the way i use the system is not to compare 10 SB for a C vs. 10 SB for an SS. it is used to compare stat categories within each position to see how much those 42 steals from a C are worth. ill even use your example.

now you can move mauers production down and Catcher A's numbers up but they still arent even close in Vorp. but what this vorp does tell me is that Catcher A is worth starting even with all those bad numbers because 40 SB IS very valuable from a C, but certainly to say that hes more valuable than Mauer or even the top 10-15 catchers in fantasy is just absurd.